So tonight after work and before the St. Louis .Net User Group meeting I ran to Borders to see if I could find my book on the shelf. Well guess what, I did!
I was pretty stoked to find it, but was shocked to only see the DNN4 book on the shelf, not any of the other DNN books. Well after digging around for a while I found them on another section, so I took the opportunity to organize a little :D Here’s the result.
DotNetNuke is an open source framework for building websites quickly and easily. It is built on, and runs on Microsoft technology, and is extensible through the use of extensions known as modules, skins and providers. There is a whole ecosystem of websites that provide services and extensions for DNN, some free, some paid for. DNN is an extremely powerful tool when in the right hands, I could point you to a million sites built using the platform, but here's a cool one you might enjoy. http://www.indianmotorcycle.com/default.aspx
I started working on a book last August with a coworker of mine, Patrick Renner. In March/April we had everything finished up and the book was handed off to the production department to get squared away. Two weeks ago I received my first copies and the book started shipping out to vendors. The book is titled DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide, How to get your website up and running. http://bit.ly/dnnbook/
If you're looking for an easy way to learn how to use DotNetNuke be sure to check out our book. We wrote it to try to fill a gap in the DNN ecosystem, and to provide a good resource for people who are brand new to DNN and want to learn how to create a site and manage the content on that site. http://bit.ly/dnnbook/
You can purchase it from Amazon.com
So it looks like my travelling is starting back up here pretty quickly. This weekend Natalie and I are headed to Colorado to do another round of house hunting. We’ll be back in town either Sunday or Monday, thankfully Kim is staying at our place again to watch the dogs while we are gone, thanks Kim! For more info on that trip check out http://www.going2colorado.com/
Next weekend I’ll be cruising around Missouri and Illinois on a Harley with Kevin, we did this two years ago and wanted to do it again before the move to CO. The week after that I’m headed to Virginia for a couple of days of DotNetNuke Training. I’ll be back in town the weekend of our niece’s birthday party, and then the following week I head to Tampa Florida for the Day of DotNetNuke. The DayOfDNN is actually on Saturday but I’ll be doing a DotNetNuke Essentials Workshop on Friday, and also a DotNetNuke Best Practices Workshop on Sunday following the event.
In other news I also got word this week that I’ve been accepted as a speaker for the third year in a row for the DotNetNuke OpenForce conference held in Las Vegas in November. I’m honored to have been selected to speak again, there were a lot of submissions this year and a lot of big names in the community included in those submissions. Also a quick congrats to my fellow Engage employee Cuong Dang for having two sessions at OpenForce this year, his second time attending and presenting.
It’s turning out to be a busy summer, hopefully we find a house this weekend so we can get our move on and get settled so we can enjoy all the upcoming things!
So I'm here in Minneapolis teaching another week of DotNetNuke Training. It's an interesting town, but I'm looking forward to being home again this weekend and working on the Datsun www.project240z.com
Monday it looks like I am driving to Indianapolis for the day to meet with a new client, then driving home Monday night. That'll make for a long day, but I would rather do that then stay over night.
Check out my flickr feed for some photos www.flickr.com/photos/chammond/
While i've been here I've been trying to finish up a few chapter reviews from the production layouts for the book. I have one chapter left to review, and Pat has a chapter or two to finish up. After that I "think" we're done with the book, but we'll see what the publisher says!
So it’s just after 1am on Monday March 9th, 2009. Pat Renner and I have wrapped up and submitted the final chapter of our DotNetNuke book. We are far from complete on the whole book writing process, but we are at least at the big milestone of being done with the majority of the writing of the book.
Now we begin the process of editing our chapters that we are getting back from the editor and technical editor. I got the first chapter back for author review before my trip to Orlando last week but had to set it aside and focus on finishing up the writing process before starting on it. Tonight (Monday) will begin the process of the author review and cleaning up the materials so that they can be sent off to the production department.
The book writing process is interesting, fun, painful, a great education experience. I’ve learned so much about DNN, but more importantly about how to communicate what I know about DNN in an easy to understand manner. At least I hope I have! I guess we will find out when people start reading the book!
I’ll post more about my trip to Orlando later this week, I wish I had stayed another night to watch the Kepler launch, but because the book wasn’t finished I had to get home.
So it’s Monday Tuesday morning and I just sent off my submission for the third chapter of our DotNetNuke book. Pat sent of his third chapter last week, he has one more to finish up, I have one and then we have one final chapter we are going to work on together as a closing/advanced topics section for the book. Our deadline is 2/20, I think we’ll be on target to get things finished up on time, if not on time a day or two late over that weekend. I’m looking forward to being “done” for a while, though I don’t imagine I will be slowing down anytime soon.
After the book chapters are all submitted I imagine we’ll start getting the chapters back from the editors with changes. I also will be registering for an online economics course so that I can get the last few credits I need to finish up my BS in Econ in time for our summer move.
Update: it looks like the publish date for the book has been pushed back to 6/22/09 according to Amazon.
No, this isn’t a hang over blog post. I’m here in Connecticut doing some super secret (not really) work and got to hang out with the cast of Mondays What Sunday Threw Up for dinner tonight.
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not much of a podcast guy, I have tried in the past, but I like my music too much to listen to something else throughout the day. That might have to change now. As soon as I get home I’m going to add this to my podcasts on my Zune software to start syncing up the show. These guys are damn funny in person, the clip I heard from a show from a few years ago was even more funny, so I am going to have to give this a whirl. I question, when would I listen though? I’m concerned if I listen while driving down the road I might laugh myself off the road…
Thanks for dinner tonight guys, it was fun and I hope to see you all again!
So it’s 2009 now, almost 5 days in already. I’m going to compile a quick list of website statistics for ChrisHammond.com. Read the full post for more info
So December 15th was our first book deadline. Pat and I met early Sunday morning and went through both of our chapters making some reviews. He ended up submitting his chapter on the 15th, mine was submitted late due to some pretty major overhauls we made to the structure of the chapter. I found the first chapter hard to write, I think the next few chapters will be easier. Chapter 1 was the intro/overview of all things, so it was hard to try to wrap all that information up into basic content that our intended reader will be able to understand.
We’re waiting on feedback from our editor for the submitted chapters, hopefully we’ll get some of that before our next deadline of 1/15, otherwise we feel like we’re writing blind. We’ve already started on the next chapters for the deadline, I’m dealing more with actual DNN content in these chapters, so I think they will be much easier to write now.
More updates in the future.
It's Christmas Eve, 2:30am, and what am I doing? Working of course. I've been up for a while here posting a bunch of things on Codeplex. The projects aren't published yet, so you can't see them, but you might see them show up here in a few days! Cool things, big changes, are a comin!
So I’m home this weekend working on the book, our first deadline is on Monday, so Pat and I are both working on finishing up our submissions. To procrastinate a little I decided to do a quick search on Amazon, not expecting to find it, but I did! I found a listing for our book! Here it is!
DotNetNuke 5 User's Guide: Get Your Website Up and Running
Now, I must get back to writing.
So I made some more changes to ChrisHammond.com today. I updated the URL structure of the site to use the URL Master module from http://www.iFinity.com.au. So far it’s working great. The urls should be shorter and cleaner now, hopefully more SEO friendly as well. Take a look around, if you see anything wrong let me know.
Happy Thanksgiving!!!!
So this won’t be a long blog post, it’s late and I’m working on Engage: Publish. But it will be a post nonetheless as I find this funny, and very cool at the same time. In the past hour, I have talked via IM to three different people. Bill Walker, in Canada, Imran in Dubai, and I just finished talking to Stefan in the Netherlands. All three of these people I’ve been talking with I saw face to face within the past 7 weeks, in those countries! (Well, not Canada, I saw Bill in Las Vegas, I’ve yet to make a trip to Canada, but that is definitely a goal for 2009).
I haven’t talked to a single person here in the United States in about two hours when I quit playing XBox 360 (racing against some guys from http://solo2.org).
I have always been one to talk to a lot of people, and keep in touch with people from all over the US as we moved around a lot. We even spent 2 years on Guam and got to tour the Pacific a little bit. DotNetNuke though in the past year has taken me all over the place, I’ve made all sorts of new friends and built stronger relationships with those people I’ve met along the way.
My how DotNetNuke has changed my life!
So for the past week I’ve been working on a new skin/layout. It’s not much, but it’s a start of cleaning up my personal site a little. I’m going to be making some tweaks to the formatting of the way the blog posts are displayed over the next couple of weeks. In order to do that though I need to get the 5.3 version of Engage: Publish released so that I can get to work on the templating system for the module that will allow me to do the new formatting that I want.
What do you think of the new look?
Pat and I have been meeting the past two weeks going over materials and thoughts for the book we are writing about DotNetNuke. I’ve worked on it quite a bit in that time frame, but with all my travelling in October and work as a result of that travelling I had only spent time flushing out the topics for my first chapter, trying to organize what I want to write about. But not actually starting the writing process around that content. My plan is to flush out as much as possible before hand and then write based on that assortment of information, I think this will help me organize my content and make sure I hit the topics I want to for each chapter and sections within those chapters.
So tonight I got into the actual writing process, and what did I write about? Something that wasn’t included in my flushed outline for the chapter. :) I did however go back and add that information to my outline so that I can look at my outlines for each chapter during and after the writing and locate exactly where I covered items for reference purposes.
It’s now 1:30am, far later than I had planned to go to sleep, but Natalie is out of town so I took the time to get started. Pat and I are meeting to go over where we are so far, my goal is to have my first chapter ready for submission by the 15th of the month, I think if I spend an hour or two each day, preferably more this weekend, working on it I can make that happen.
More updates later in the process!
I don't know why it has taken me this long, but I've finally taken down all the google ads from my personal website at www.chrishammond.com. I had the page all littered up with ads for the past few years. I just ran a report on my google adsense account and it looks like I started running ads on ChrisHammond.com somewhere around 8/23/2004. Since that time I've had 373k page impressions, 2,565 clicks, with earnings near $466. That averages to about 309 impressions a day, 2 clicks per day, a click through rate of .69% and $1.25 CPM. Not a bad overall number, but for 4 years, making $116 a year on ads I don't think it is worth the clutter on the site anymore.
So for now, ChrisHammond.com is Google Adsense free. That doesn't mean I won't have other ads running on the site, I will most likely setup some sort of banner system between all of my websites (102 total domains on my godaddy account now), to cross promote all the various things I work on throughout the year.
What do you think? Are google adsense ads a waste with the numbers generated above?
So I got a random email tonight, his words not mine, from a 21 year old Comp Sci student up in Wisconsin.
"I'm 21, a computer science major at a smaller private college in Wisconsin. I stumbled on your blog just by chance. I see that you're 31, a software developer, and (if I do say so myself) leading a pretty nice life.
I was just curious what kind of career path you took that led you to where you are today?"
Check out my full blog post to see my response.
So Dang's training went well today, I worked on creating a clean DotNetNuke C# template for WAP projects, I hope to get it tested a bit more and then release it via www.engagemodules.com later this week.
Tomorrow evening I'm off to Peru.
I made a few changes to the site this evening, a few things I've had planned for a while. Now, all my blog posts from www.project240z.com, www.corvettez06.org and http://weblogs.asp.net/christoc will all aggregate here, so you can pull in my RSS feed from www.chrishammond.com and get whatever blog posts I make on those sites as well. The links should take you directly to the blog posts on those sites.
If you see any problems with this please let me know, I'm excited to get this flexibility built into the site and have another project to be announced later this week that will use this feature as well!
3 Days of DNN Training down, 2 to go. I spoke at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group tonight www.capitaldug.com, it went a bit longer than expected, but hopefully was fruitful for those in attendance.
Over the years of offering and providing
DotNetNuke Training I've had the opportunity to train people from and travel to locations all over the United States. I figured it was time to put together a list of some of the locations I've been to and provided training to people from:
Well here goes my first blog post from the cell phone. Today I am conducting the first class in our second week of classroom DNN training. Up bright and early to the sunrise, though I think that will be the last of the sun seen today based on the thunder I hear now!
I'll be presenting at the St. Louis .Net User Group meeting tonight. If you're in town and have nothing else to do come on out!
www.stlnet.org
I've not been posting many DNN related blog posts here lately, there's a reason for that. I've been trying to seperate my personal site, www.chrishammond.com from some of the technical posts. Right now they are all being posted at http://weblogs.asp.net/christoc and my blog on dotnetnuke.com.
That will all be changing soon though, stay tuned for what I think is a very cool announcement later this week!